Is President Trump’s new press secretary a lawyer — or did she just play one on TV?
Three days into her job, Katie Zacharia is facing questions about whether she has embroidered her credentials. She describes herself as a lawyer, and the president called her “an attorney.” When she was asked on Tuesday in which state she passed the bar exam, she twice replied, “When I moved to China.”
Huh?
The moment capped off a shaky debut for the woman who has accepted what is perhaps the most challenging public relations post in the United States. Now she was struggling to tell her own story.
On Wednesday evening, she told The New York Times that this whole mishegas over “lawyer,” “attorney,” and “China,” has been one big misunderstanding.
“I assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school?’” she said, taking a quick phone call on the tarmac in Arizona, where the president was holding a midterm rally.
“That’s all I could hear over the sound of Marine One,” she said. “And, wanting to respect protocol, the distance behind the president, kept me from moving closer to hear the question.”
It was only her second day on the job, she pointed out.
So here’s the truth about Katie Zacharia, not-quite attorney-at-law: She graduated with a law degree from Pepperdine University in 2011. That technically makes her a lawyer. But is she an attorney, someone who is licensed to practice law and give legal advice? For that, she would have needed to pass the bar. The Times was unable to find a law license for her in California, or anywhere else she has lived in the United States.
During the brief phone call Wednesday, The Times did not get a chance to press her again about whether she had ever passed a bar exam. But before she had to go, she did explain that when she first began appearing on cable news, she consulted with Pepperdine’s president as to how she should identify herself. She said she was warned not to use the words “attorney” or “esquire,” but that “lawyer” was OK.
But what about “general counsel,” would that be OK? Because, on LinkedIn, Ms. Zacharia identified herself as such for Fix California, a group led by Trump loyalist Richard Grenell.
“You can’t be a general counsel to a company in the United States unless you’re admitted to the bar to practice law,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “A general counsel implies that you’re practicing law, giving legal advice to the company. You can’t practice law without a license.”
On Wednesday, a watchdog group filed a complaint with the California State Bar Association, calling for an investigation into whether Ms. Zacharia “repeatedly held herself out to the public as entitled to practice law without a license to do so, conduct California law treats as a crime.”
And that brings us to China.
The White House explained this week that Ms. Zacharia moved to China with her husband, Tyler, who had a job at a U.S. private equity firm. While there, she worked on “international transaction law,” Ms. Zacharia has claimed.
On her LinkedIn profile, she listed nearly two years of employment at Zhong Lun Law Firm, which is one of China’s biggest law firms, with headquarters in Beijing and offices in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Almaty, Kazakhstan.
The law firm did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Opportunities for foreign lawyers in China are extremely narrow. Foreign nationals cannot sit for China’s bar exam, hold a Chinese lawyer’s license or advise on Chinese law. They can, however, be hired by Chinese law firms to work on cross-border deals and to advise on foreign or international law.
Gary Gao, a partner at Zhong Lun who is based in Shanghai, said the firm often hired foreigners for language assistance and to help Chinese staff understand foreign business culture.
“They are not practicing Chinese law at any time,” he said, adding that Ms. Zacharia’s role at the firm would have likely been similar to a paid internship.
Sida Liu, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong who specializes in mainland law, said that it is misleading for Ms. Zacharia to describe herself as a former associate at Zhong Lun, because it implies that she was a licensed lawyer in China.
“Chinese law firms can hire foreign nationals to work in their mainland offices, but such individuals are not classified as P.R.C. lawyers because P.R.C. lawyer qualification requires P.R.C. citizenship,” Mr. Liu said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “The title ‘associate’ may therefore be somewhat controversial.”
So what are we to make of all this?
It was Mr. Trump who called Ms. Zacharia an “attorney,” and she certainly never corrected the record. She called herself “general counsel,” which was misleading at best.
Confucius wrote in The Analects that without the trust of the people, the state cannot stand. The same goes for a White House press secretary. It is a job that’s all about credibility. It’s pretty tough to succeed if the public (let alone the fourth estate) feels that it cannot trust what it is being told.
Reporting was contributed by Kitty Bennett in Washington and David Pierson in Hong Kong.
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